Before I begin my tangent let me start by saying I am hesitant to even use the term “identity politics.” I feel that the term is used more often than not to silence the voices of women or people of color in leftist spaces when confronting the reality of what it means to be anti racist becomes uncomfortable. That said, I think that there is a staunch difference between liberal identity politics and leftist identity politics.

Leftists acknowledge intersectionalityand use it to improve their analysis so that they may recruit and engage with more people in a more diverse way. Liberals use identity politics totokenize, to excuse their own complacency in white supremacy, and most shallowly to get votes.

This is why I get infuriated when we talk about “the women vote” or “the black vote,” as if anyone who is not a white straight male in our society is of some bizarre kind of hive mind.

Pundits dehumanize LGBTQA+ people when they assume Buttigieg has their votes locked down simply because he is gay.

I hope everyone realizes that is what pundits and politicians are saying when they sayings like “the coveted black women vote.”

They are saying that oppressed groups of voters, such as black people, women, black women are nothing more than who they vote for president and what is worse is the dehumanizing idea that they will all vote for the same person for the same reasons.

When it comes down to discussing the “woman vote” or the “black vote” in the eyes of liberal and conservative pundits you are no longer a collection of individuals, each with your own stories and culture and background and reasoning. No, to them you are simply a part of a demographic, a thing to be used as fodder for politicians and talking heads alike.

They are fucking insulting you and reducing you to an infantile point. We should not stand for this.

Like this:

Elizabeth Warren turned down an invitation from Fox News to do a candidate town hall, calling the “news” station out for their blatant hate speech and for “giving a megaphone,” to racists.

While Warren is right that the fake news network is a homing beacon to the vomit inducing white right, she has lost an opprotunity to gain serious political capital by rejecting their invitation.

Now I want to stress this point before I go any further, Warren is not obliged to go on Fox News. To be honest any leftist or anyone who leans left is not obligated to take the baited hook that right wingers like Fox News or Ben Shapiro throw. “Debate me!”

Warren is also one hundred percent right about the station’s explicit racism and implicent enabling of violent white supremacy.

However, Warren has shot herself in the foot once again, like she did when she released that racist DNA test and when she endorsed Hillary Clinton. This would have been Warren’s opprotunity to save face with the white and rural voters who are so quick to reject her for the connections she made in her career to Obama and Hillary Clinton. If she had taken this town hall she could have used it as a platform to go into the heart of the belly of the beast and take down the harmful talking points against her policies, much like how Bernie did.

Bernie went into the belly of the beast, knife in hand, and came out holding the monster’s heart to the sky. When the anchor was bested by his own baiting question about government run healthcare, it was check mate for Bernard Sanders.

Bernie’s town hall gave him a huge degree of political capital. Overnight one of Fox News’ most idiotic talking points was defeated, “Most people don’t want government run health care,” they like to say. Yet with a simple cheering of the crowd and Bernie on the receiving end, the station has now been forced to scramble and rethink its rhetoric.

That is a key to winning in the art of war, keep your enemy confused, and make no mistake, we are in a class war.

This is the chance that Warren has thrown away, the chance to let Fox News own itself, as the kids would say, and come out the other end victorious and validated. By refusing the invitation, she has only played into the fodder that democrats cannot speak to Fox News base, and that fodder will cost her in the long run should she actually win the nomination.

Warren is right, Fox News is the news station for racists. However you do not end racism by running away from it. Racism ends only when it is confronted. The same with all forms of bigotry and prejudice. Bernie confronted the prejudice that Americans fear big government more than they fear big insurance, and he won. That is something the left is finally getting good at again, winning.